


In the Pines

by Morgan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Other, UST, pre-series AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2019-08-24 06:29:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16634744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morgan/pseuds/Morgan
Summary: “Sam was just a kid when his father loaded him and Dean into a truck and headed up into the Ozarks where they settled in an old log cabin style house with creaky floorboards and musty furniture.”





	1. Chapter 1

Name forsaken when they get asked and they remember right enough so as to just say the things that others want hearing. People always asking and asking. “Where are you boys from?” and the like. And those days, those things said, they be most always the same anyway. Dig will tell them “Kansas” and give them smile for miles and that’s what they’ll remember, them folks who ask for the where and when and whatfor and how they came to be where they are.

But Kansas ain’t it. Not for true.

“No matter, East, tell ‘em what they want to hear.”

And they’ve been doing that for a long damned time. ‘Cause of what their daddy done they ain’t all the way flatlanders. They can play at it, though. They can play at being most anything.

***

Sam was just a kid when his father loaded him and Dean into a truck and headed up into the Ozarks where they settled in an old log cabin style house with creaky floorboards and musty furniture. The TV only worked when it was in a good mood and the closest neighbors where a couple of miles down some rutted dirt track.

Dad was unusually quiet the whole way there and wouldn’t talk about what had happened at Bobby’s. Dean sat mostly staring out the window and Sam felt the draw in the undercurrents between his brother and his father and knew better than to try getting an explanation. He had his head in a book most of the way and the sky got dark fast. Eventually the glowing sweep of streetlights put him to sleep with the way they zoomed past in metronomic intervals.

If he’d known then what would come later he would have paid better attention. He didn’t, so he wasn’t. It was hard sometimes, feeling like they knew so much more than he did. Especially when they didn’t talk to him.

The first long days were mostly just them cleaning out the place they would be living in, Sam trying not to complain because it was clear by then that something big had happened and he didn’t know how bad it really was, but it was bad enough that Dean didn’t ask any questions, so Sam didn’t either.

It was early spring and Sam wasn’t used to the way the air smelled, or how much noise the wind made, or how they had to cut wood for the fireplace.

Dad went out and brought back groceries, cans of soup and spaghetti and cereal. Dad went out again and came back late in the evening looking kind of dark faced and angry. Dean didn’t say anything when dad didn’t want the dinner they had saved for him and Sam went to bed after washing up in cold water. He and Dean were sleeping in the one big bed that was up the stairs, close to the roof. It was a little warmer up there once the fire had been going for a while, but he still had on his flannel pajamas and was glad when Dean shoved into bed next to him.

Dad must have stayed up late that night because they found him sleeping in the musty recliner in front of the fire with a half empty bottle placed carelessly next to the back leg and his leather bound journal open on his lap. Dean made that worried face that made Sam’s stomach hurt before hustling them both out the door with just cold poptarts for breakfast.

They poked about in the little shed next to the house for a while and then walked around, trying to get “the lay of the land” as Dean said.

Years later Sam thinks they were so green back then it almost hurts to think about. They would learn, though. They sure would.

***

It was a Wendigo.

They found that out later.

Dad had brought them into the mountains the same way he hustled them everywhere, not really knowing what he was walking them into. What he was walking himself into, come to that.

There are lots of old mines in hill country. Lead, zinc, iron. Barite. That’s why land is all there is if you want to be rich in the mountains. The ones who didn’t sell to mining companies or logging were smart. Stubborn as all unholy hell, but smart. They sit pretty now on riches untold. But that’s nothing to John Winchester who only came for one thing – to hunt.

There’s good hunting in the Ozarks. Good fishing too, if you know the way of it. Not the kind of hunting that interested John. He was just after one thing.

Too bad it got him first.

***

When spring comes on there’s wood sorrel and sweet rocket and heal-all. There are oxeye daisies. There are bugs everywhere. The weather’s airish, but not too bad. Dean sniffles and Sam buries his nose in the scarf Dean wrapped around him. They’ve been alone for two months and things are new and strange.

At first Sam isn’t worried like Dean is. Dean paces and waits and talks about how dad will be back soon. It seems like that’s the way it’s been for years and Sam doesn’t really think it’s different this time. Dean gets short, his temper waxing and waning. Then they start running low on food. Dean stretches it. Dean eats less than Sam does and he’s always cold. Sam thinks they have to do something. Call someone. But then it’s like something takes Dean over and he sits them down on the couch and says “Sammy” in this wrecked tone that makes Sam’s eyes water before he even starts really talking.

It all comes out then. Dad’s a hero. Dad hunts things like what killed mom. Dad has been training Dean to do the same. Dad has been telling Dean secrets that Sam wasn’t part of. Sam hates him for it and then cries until his eyes run dry and his nose is so snotty he can’t breathe and then Dean says “I don’t know if he’s coming back” and starts crying too.

If dad’s a hero and dad’s the best and dad’s been doing this the whole time, then why isn’t he back yet?

It’s a hard pill to swallow.

There are some things, Dean says, that are going to be trouble.

They’re in the mountains in a cabin someone dad knows got for them. No one is expecting them anywhere. No one is waiting for them to call. No one knows anything about them. Dad doesn’t have many friends. Dad took the car. Dad left his emergency money and one shotgun loaded with rock salt for Dean.

Dad might not be coming back.

It hits Sam like hail - dad isn’t coming back. He can feel that knowledge reverberate in his bones, strike by strike along with his heartbeat.

***

They meet Crow and Lynn a while after that. Crow is about Dean’s age, dark-haired and flat jawed. He has deep set eyes that gleam pale blue and he’s wearing a Cardinals ball cap. Lynn is taller than Dean, a little older, dressed in a man’s shirt and jeans. Her hair goes all the way down to her waist and there’s a knife in her belt. When she smiles she shows one crooked incisor, but it just makes her smile better.

They live “yander”. They don’t seem too fussed about the fact that Sam and Dean’s mom and dad aren’t around. Seems like that’s not something anyone is going to be fussed about. Lynn says something like “daddy goes off to work too”. She can drive their rust bucket pickup and Dean is quick to negotiate some kind of deal with her for a ride to Wal-Mart.

Dean buys value packs. He buys rice and beans and elbows. He buys cans of tomato sauce and ravioli and milk. He buys a big bag of apples. He buys chocolate sauce. He buys peanut butter and bread. He buys a bag of candy bars. When Sam goes outside to help him lug it all in Lynn is sitting behind the wheel of the pale green pickup and Sam has this sudden thought that she looks like a kid, just another little kid playing at being grown up. Too young to drive and too young to be helping them out like this. Then she smiles and gives Dean a little salute and Sam thinks they’ve all stopped being kids.

“’M I gonna go to school, Dean?” Sam asks when they’re sitting in front of the fire later.  
“You want to?” Dean asks and he’s looking so tired all of a sudden.  
  
Sam shrugs. He started, kind of, last semester and he was already moved ahead so he figures it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t go for a while, just until the rest of the kids his age catch up.

“You gonna go?” Sam asks.  
“Don’t see how I can when dad’s not around. Don’t know how to work that out.”

Sam is sitting next to him and it’s gotten real dark outside and it’s kind of cold and kind of impossible to wrap his head around all this. He leans against Dean’s shoulder instead.

“What are we going to do?” he asks.  
“I don’t know, Sammy. I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”

Eventually they do.  
They don’t have any other choice.

***

Here’s the thing – every place is different. Every town is its own little microcosm. The rules don’t always apply the same. Some rules are more important than others. Like… Lynn isn’t supposed to be driving the pickup but there’s no one else to do it and they need to get to the store and they need to go places sometimes. So Lynn drives and the county sheriff doesn’t really care. On the other hand you watch closely for the conservation agent when you go hunting, because they do care.

A lot of folks are on disability and food stamps, but that doesn’t mean they’re not proud and smart and thrifty.

Sam and Dean are too damned young to be on their own. Sam doesn’t understand how they’re going to make it. They need some things that they have to have a grownup for.

Ten years later he thinks him and his brother are strange blessed and cursed creatures. They survive the first year. They survive the second year.

By the third year the Sam and Dean that rode into the hills under their father’s care are gone.

They’re entirely new creatures now, with the hills in their blood just as much as anything Winchester.

***

Sam became East somewhere in there. It came about like this: Dad used to call him Sammy and Sam doesn’t want to hear it no more. Not from anyone other than Dean. He bloodied some noses over it until Dean put a stop to that and then somehow he was “the littlest brother” for a while and then he was just “littlest”, but that got too long too, so then it got whittled down to “Est”, but when they say it is always sounds like “East”.

And Dean was Big Brother D until that got switched around so he was Bigger D which soon went into Digger Be and that slammed into Digger and then just Dig.

If Sam was East then Dean was Dig and that was all there was to it. It’s not like Crow’s name is really Crow. And Lynn has something pretty in front that she won’t ever say, like Vera or Mary or Mabel. They don’t really know and it ain’t polite to ask after other folks’ business.

Family carries scars. Names carry meaning. That they understand.


	2. Chapter 2

By the time Dean’s fourteen he’s been lying about his own age and Sammy’s for so long that he might as well be sixteen. They’re both bony and growing and wiry and scrappy. Some people might think they’re lying about things and some folks know for sure, but the way it works is, as long as no one is hurt and nothing goes wrong, they go on living their lives.

Dad should have thought it through before he brought them up here.

Sam goes to school. Dean does too, sort of, when he’s not picking up work. They’re too young be on their own, but Dean’s smart. So smart. He manages to sweet talk Sammy’s way smooth. He talk rings around the stressed social worker who hunts them down, saying something about dad working away most of the time and “yes, ma’m, no ma’m”s their way past some incredible hurdles. She doesn’t know what to do with them in the end, because Sam’s grades are good, his clothes are worn but whole, his belly is full and he’s in need of a haircut, but cheerful and sweet tempered and Dean’s acting more put together than some adults Sam could name.

“Daddy’s a war veteran, ma’m. He don’t do too good with people,” says Dean.   
“Momma died when Sam was a baby and it’s just been us since,” says Dean.   
“Dean takes good care of me,” says Sam.   
“We get by,” says Sam.

How they get away with it, Sam will never know. Maybe she was just that harried. Maybe she’s got too many folders with high school dropouts and teenage pregnancies and drug addiction, petty crime on the road to bigger crime. Maybe two hardworking, clean scrubbed kids living in poor scrubbed circumstance is a success story to her even if she never gets to talk to their daddy ‘cause he’s got issues from the war. They’re not being beaten on and they’re not on drugs and they’re not shooting up the town. They’re good boys. Mostly.

Mostly.

***

They fight, sometimes. Dean can be mean and Sam can be a little snot. They get into screaming matches, banging doors, kicking furniture.

After one particular very angry, very shouty fight that ended when Dean stomped off into the woods yelling that he wished dad hadn’t brought Sam with them, things got bad. It was in the autumn and the weather turned on a dime, hard rain coming down, lighting sparking and rolling. Sam was too angry at first to even care. But then Dean didn’t come back. Sam’s anger started dragging into something else and he began to worry. Dean still didn’t come back. Then the worry started eating at him and the wind picked up and Sam got scared.

He couldn’t even remember what they had been fighting about that was so important. It was some petty little thing, just living on top of each other and Dean tired and sore from working and Sam tired and angry from school and it all just got away from them, like wild horses.

By the time Dean got back that night Sam was frantic, breath hitching in something like sobs and he was sitting by the fire, rocking, trying to hold it all in with his arms wrapped tight around his knees. Dean had come through the door, slamming in with the storm battering him and standing there, backlit by lightning, swaying, saying “Sammy?” in this rusted out voice like he’d been shouting at the sky all night.

Sam flew at him, arms around a soaked Dean, thudding into him so hard he almost took him to the floor saying “sorry, sorry, sorry” and sobbing, breath getting away from him, so scared. Dean’s arms had come around him, hugging the stuffing out of him, shivering cold and just as scared, Sam thinks. Just as scared of what they had almost done to each other, because the mountains aren’t tame. The mountains aren’t friendly. The mountains are beautiful like snakes are beautiful.   
  
“We can’t do that again,” Dean told him. “We can’t fight like that.”

All strength went out of Sam, muscles turning to water. He clung to Dean like briar, sorrys spilling from his lips. Dean pulled back a little, trying to catch his eyes.

“No, hey, not like that. You and me, yeah? We stick together. We’re okay.”   
“Yeah, Dean, yeah. We stick.”

What the hell else were they supposed to do?

People all around were good, but had their own troubles and Dean and Sam they weren’t hill-born. They could live a hundred years and still be outsiders. They knew it wasn’t malicious, but they weren’t born here, they weren’t ever going to be blood true to the hills, have bones in the churchyard, names on the street signs.

After that fight something between him and Dean changed, got quiet and settled deep. They had always been good at doing together, but they hadn’t always gotten along and now, even when they bickered it was much more careful and it didn’t have the same sting. Dean stopped picking on him, stopped being really angry and Sam stopped trying to get under his skin, realizing he was there already and not wanting to be a barb or a burr.

***

Scrawny as Sam was he was still about two years ahead of where he should have been in school, their fudged records making him out to be something he wasn’t. He never really thought about it much, except when the nurse the school brought in to do some kind of health check called him borderline underdeveloped for his age, or when he fell behind in gym. He played sports, but he was never going to be as strong as the other kids in his class. He was fast, though. And wily.

Dean was scrawny too but to Sam he was a tower of strength. He was smart and fierce and honestly he was the main reason no one tried to bully Sam. Sure they picked on him, called him “runt” and “egghead” and stuff like that, but that was as far as it went. It helped too that Dean never stopped working them on the training that dad had started.

At first all they had was the shotgun dad had left with Dean, but Dean managed to get them a good used hunting rifle. Back when dad was still with them it had always been “no, Sammy, you’re too little”, but that was then. Now was different. What Dean knew he taught Sam. What Sam learned, he taught Dean. It was strange the things they knew and the things they had to learn.

They’ve always lived a pretty odd life, Sam figures. Never staying for long in one place, picking up and moving on and leaving things behind. He’d used to dream about a home, a place they would stay for more than a couple of months, and now that they have it he’s faced with how much work that really is. Stupid things like buying toilet paper and trying to pay the electrical bill were harder than you’d think.

One thing about living rural was that pretty much everyone around them knew about being self-sufficient. It was a point of pride with some, like the Darrell who pretty much lived off the land in the wide open all the time. It meant hunting for game and fishing and trading some of their overflow for spiced crabbabbles. It meant Dean learning to work car engines to keep Lynn’s family pickup running in return for getting the groceries. It meant that Sam and Dean would find themselves out in an apple orchard picking fallen fruit after the harvesters had been through. It meant learning to stay away from the trailers where they knew drugs were being sold or manufactured. It meant Dean learning to hold in his comments when a girl that liked him tried inviting him to church on Sunday. Baptist, not that that made much of a difference. It meant Sam wearing Dean’s cast off jeans when he grew out of them with the hem folded up twice. It meant picking dewberrys in the summer, digging for wild turnips and thistle roots. It meant emptying out all the boxes and cupboards and the shed to see what they could find that they could use and what they could sell or trade.

Sam thought about it much later, the way they were suddenly living this life that seemed like they were stuck fifty years behind the rest of the world, but somehow more forward in some things.

He liked reading. He liked learning all kinds of things and the difference between when dad tried to teach him, all tetchy impatience and “why can’t you be more like your brother”, and when Dean did it, steady hands and staying power. He liked learning, he liked doing. He liked being brought more to breast with Dean instead of always tagging along behind, only being told what was deemed necessary.

***

The Russell family, one of the biggest, most influential families in the area always knew everything about everything that went on and was of importance. Dean had run into the oldest brother of their generation in town, in the Wal-Mart parking lot. He’d told Dean “I know your daddy’s gone” and Dean had been so fucking scared and angry, wanting to yell “what do you know about it”, but he had known he couldn’t draw that kind of attention.

The Russells were into all kinds of things, legal and illegal. They had money and they had land, but most of all they were as deep in the mountains as a lead vein, family branching out so that everyone knew someone who was someone to the Russells. When they said they had moved up there after the war, they meant the war of 1812. The first Russell had come on up and married a Cherokee woman and that was how they all got started. Sam and Dean could not afford to be on their bad side. Dean would have preferred if the Russell clan didn’t even know they existed. But he had been called out in the parking lot and had to answer for his daddy being gone. He hadn’t even had time to think up a good lie.

Trey Russell had noticed them, but didn’t seem to want anything. He had just stopped Dean, being all neighbourly. Dean didn’t buy it, knew there was something more to that, but couldn’t for the life of him figure out what. Sam knew that talking about dad with Dean was still like poking an open wound. He had stopped asking if Dean thought dad was coming back about six months in on the tacit understanding that he was either dead, gone or had forgotten all about them. Sam wasn’t sure which of those hurt worse.

***

The TV doesn’t work most of the time, not that they mind much. There’s homework and there’s things to do and then Sam likes to read. Especially late when they have a fire going and it’s cosy. Sometimes he’ll curl up in the corner of the couch and then wait until Dean comes and sits next to him, doing something, ‘cause Dean’s almost always doing something, and then he’ll tuck his feet under Dean’s thigh, or slowly migrate closer, seeking body heat. Dean lets him.

Dean will be putting something together or taking something apart, like an old clock radio or a lamp or a walkman or a toaster. He’ll put it back together with new wires and maybe sell it on or trade it or sometimes the things are for them, so they can have something, like light or music. Dean’s hands work steady and Sam turns the pages and they don’t talk much, but sometimes Sam will wiggle his toes and Dean will reach down and rub at his feet until Sam feels warm all through. It’s a good, quiet feeling.

Sam trades books. He’s got a stack that he bought at goodwill and he’s got paperbacks that he can trade back and forth with the people around him who like to read. Another myth destroyed, hillbillies like to read. It’s not just him and kids like him, it’s August, who is at least in his mid-fifties, mostly favouring historical accounts and biographies. It’s Dwyer, who tears through anything sci-fi or fantasy. It’s Kelly, who reads the same way Sam does, everything and anything, as long as it’s not stupid. Only thing she’s ever ripped on is Dickens. She hates Dickens with a burning passion. Kelly has tattoos and is at least four fifths Cherokee.

Kelly’s family are all healers going back three generations. She can cook up a cough medicine with mint and honey and eighty proof that will knock a double pneumonia loose. All through her kitchen bundles of herbs hang head down bristling and drying to be used for remedies. She’s a talker too, teaches Sam all kinds of things in a haphazard, almost accidental kind of way. Best of all she points a double barrel at a social worker come to talk to her about her daughter who is fourteen and pregnant when Sam is there. He’s never heard anyone call a woman a peckerwood before.

***

Sometimes Sam will look at himself and think – _I am too young_. He will think – _I shouldn’t know anything about gutting rabbits_. But then he will look up and see Dean smiling at him, that quiet, proud smile that he only ever shows for Sam. And then it’s okay.


	3. Chapter 3

Sam sometimes leaves soot smears on the pages of his homework, fingerprinted equations and a treatise on Lincoln. He will catch traces of lemon on the paper and notice the stain of coffee shaped like Africa in the margin of his econ essay.

“Shouldn’t be drinking that, stunt your growth,” Dean tells him.   
“Shut your mouth, Digger, you have a _travel mug_ ,”Sam shoots back.   
“Cause the brew travels, see, just like I do,” Dean says, slurping at the lid and giving Sam a slow side eye.   
“Oh, ha.”

And Dean singing soft and low when he’s chopping wood “ _in the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines_ ”. He comes in with resin stains on his hands and bark in his boots. Sam finds his heart thudding and he can’t even say for sure why.

Dean walks up behind him one day and grabs Sam at the waist, rubs his chin to Sam’s and says, smiling:   
“Think I need to learn how to shave soon, littlest?”

Sam never knows why these things make him think “melancholy” like the word is a headline, caption of the things that make grief more than thinking his daddy is most likely dead in a hole in the ground, bones sunk in soft soil and overgrown by greenbrier and plantains. They may never know where all the bones are scattered, picked over by carrion birds.

He found dad’s journal tucked between the seat cushion and the armrest of the chair in front of the fire and he and Dean have both read it through and through. Crazy things, but not any more crazy than the ghost horse of Pine Hill or the Darrell claiming he saw Bigfoot in the gloaming, a running, loping thing in the grey shadows.

It’s already got claws in Dean, the idea of hunting. He’s already been through some of all this with their dad back when Sam was in the dark about it. How it matters now is not all that clear to Sam, but he understands about things that are unseen, unheard, more felt than known. He can tell it is a part of what makes Dean get up in the mornings and run, or go out in the evenings and shoot, though that’s just as much about learning to be better for them to have something when deer is in season.

He doesn’t argue it. How can he? He could just as well argue that Dean’s eyes aren’t green, that their mom isn’t gone. He could just as well argue that they’re destined to be here now when he knows that’s just coincidence. If he lets himself think on it too much he starts resenting the secrets that dad and Dean kept and he doesn’t want to resent anything from Dean, not anymore. They’re all there is. He needs to not resent Dean for things that weren’t his fault, that weren’t his doing. It's a choice. A decision.

Dean talks about dad a little, sometimes, always good things, always how good he was at shooting, at fighting, at doing things that matter to Dean. Sam lets him. It’s hard when the things Dean seem to value most are the things that Sam wasn’t part of. He doesn’t like the way it makes him feel like his stomach has an icy lining and there’s something heavy on his chest.

“Cold briar, Digger,” Sam says.   
“What nonsense are you talking now?” Dean answers.   
“No, not nonsense. You know. Them things that dad did they weren’t for us, not really.”

Dean blows an angry breath, going to turn away from Sam and Sam reaches out, hand at the crook of Dean’s elbow, steady grip, brother skin.

“He ain’t the one that put food on the table tonight, Dig. He ain’t the one that ran to get to me. He ain’t the one …” Sam breaks off when he sees the look in Dean’s eyes.

It’s not anger. It’s sorrow.

“I know. I know, little brother. I just want you to have something good of him, you know? Remember something good.”

Sam tightens his hold.

“You,” Sam says simply. “You’re the good.”

Dean turns his head away. Sam tugs at him a little, trying to shake him.

“You are,” Sam says with all the conviction he can muster in his skinny chest.   
“Ain’t that good. You need new boots.”   
“Yeah, I do,” Sam agrees readily. “Odds are even on whether I could have got them either way. Maybe sixty-forty. Your favour.”

Dean gives him a bleak kind of smile for that.

“I don’t remember them things. Not like you do.”  
“You can’t forget him, Sammy. It ain’t right.”  
“I’m not. I just think here is where we are, you and me. Sticking. Right?” Sam says.

Dean does a half turn and slings an arm around Sam’s shoulders, pulls him in. Sam sets his face to Dean’s chest, his shirt soft and worn and Dean smelling of sweat and pine and motor oil. Dean hugs him like that, props his chin on Sam’s head and sighs out heavy.

“Sticking like glue,” he says.   
“Like resin,” Sam murmurs.   
“Like flypaper,” Dean tells him.  
“Like honey comb.”  
“Like a shadow.”  
“Like a sticky thing,” Sam grumps.   
“Oh, you ran out already?” Dean asks and Sam huffs a laugh and sags a little more solid into Dean’s hold.

They stand like that for a while. It should maybe be strange, but it’s just not. This is him and Dean, they do this sometimes.

“I worry,” Dean says, low like confession.   
“Don’t worry,” Sam tells him and slings an arm around Dean’s waist so he can keep hold on him.   
“But I do.”  
“I know.”   
“Sammy,” Dean says and the thing is, the talk about dad, all the talk about what that was and what he meant to Dean and what their dad was like, it doesn’t carry half as much weight and meaning as just Sam’s name coming from his brother’s mouth like that.

***

Dean goes to dances and parking lot parties. He’s doing things. Sam understands it’s not about the beers or the music or the girls or the moonshine. Or, it’s not just about them things.

It’s about the people.

Dean’s smart like that. He knows that no matter how many times Mrs Hoder smiles at him, no matter how many times he talks Nichols around to letting them cut dead wood on his land, no matter how many times he helps clear snow or fix engines they still don’t belong. They’re not from here. Dean understands people, he understands about the belonging that runs through all of them, like threads binding them together.

They don’t necessarily like each other, they don’t always get along, there are old feuds and old stories and old disputes about love and land and money, but they all still belong.

Him and Sam live like wild dogs on the outskirts of all that. They slink around in the margin and make their life there, scraps and impossibilities stitched together.

“If you want a girl, just get one,” Sam tells Dean late one Saturday morning when he pokes him awake armed with a cup of coffee.

Dean rolls over slowly, hair every which way, eyes sleepy and half way to dreaming. He looks at Sam standing scarecrow with his stick limbs at angles and a careful grip on Dean’s mug. Grunting and pulling himself up to propped against the wall he makes a vague gesture and Sam sits down by his knees, passing the coffee over into Dean’s reaching prayerful hands.

“What?” Dean asks him, belatedly realizing there was something said that wasn’t wake up, or good morning.   
“I said: If you want a girl, get one. It’s not like there aren’t a few around, making eyes.”

Dean gives him a funny look.

“I … I don’t know what to say to that.”

Sam huffs.

“You can leave me alone for a little. I’m old enough. You don’t got to come back every night.”

Dean swallows a mouthful of coffee and then strikes out, snake fast hand on Sam’s wrist and pulling him in until he tumbles against Dean’s legs, half propped there.

“Listen to me, idiot. I don’t come back ‘cause I don’t think you can take care of your own self. I come back ‘cause I want to.”

Sam gives him a disbelieving look from under his too long hair. He’s managed to get a hand on the mattress to prop himself with so he doesn’t have all his weight on Dean.

“Sometimes I need to get with people. We can’t be too far out here, we need to know what’s going on. At least a little. And I need to know when there’s work, when there’s cops, when there’s someone looking.”   
“Most talk is bullshit, you know that.”  
“Yeah, sure. Most. But not all. What’s this about, huh?” Dean asks tugging at Sam’s hair with his free hand.   
“Little Jane was talking…”  
“Ah. See now, that’s just what she does. Big Jane has a cousin who has a jeep. That’s all that was, me trying to get us something so we don’t have to ride with Lynn all the time.”

Sam thinks it might be true. And then he thinks Little Jane talking was more than that because there are girls that have eyes on Dean and want more than just to be his for a while. Pregnant at sixteen is no good, but married is just fine. Dean is nice enough, even if he’s got Sam to look out for and no real claim on land or money. Dean’s got that thing about him like he’s going places.

Sam thinks later that he’s never been much of one for understanding girls like Little Jane. He understands the need to move in one direction or another, just to move. For him, though, love is not a direction or a plan. For him it’s the ache of a deep bruise. He learned that early. Some would say too early, maybe, but it is what it is.

***

Kelly tells Sam all about herbs and cures and grasses and somewhere in there he gets to asking about poison. Sam’s a curious kid. He knows there’s always a flipside to things. She gives him one of those long, long looks that mean she’s trying to read him down and he stands for it, eyes open and waiting, because he’s not innocent, but he’s not asking because he wants anything more than knowledge.

Knowing for the sake of knowing. Sam has felt that need since he was born, he thinks. Like a hunger.

“You’re going to be a Left Hand, aren’t you?” Kelly mutters, still with her eyes on Sam.   
“What’s that mean?” Sam asks in return.   
“The Left Hand is the sinister one,” Kelly tells him.

That sounds bad.

Sam has had thoughts about bad for a while. He knows there are some wrong things about him, some things that he can’t change, or do anything much about. He doesn’t always like the way that makes him feel. He read that story of the Grail and the knights and he knew then, he would never be Galahad, never be pure like that.

“There ain’t nothing wrong with being the Left Hand,” Kelly tells him sternly, seeing the look on his face. “It just means you see more than some. And you’ll be able to do more. Wipe that look off your face, now. I’ll teach you.”

Kelly, like Dean, never tells him he’s too young, or too small, or too stupid. She never says there are things he will have to wait until he’s older to know. She’s seen what he can understand and she teaches everything.

The thing about being the Left Hand is that it’s needed in compliment to the Right Hand. The Right Hand can hold the sword, or the gun, but the Left Hand will always do what’s necessary and together they are clasped around the heart. That’s what Kelly says. Sam understands all by himself that if he’s the Left Hand, then his brother is the right and what they clasp, the heart, that’s the two of them, together. That’s him and his brother. The heart of it all, because they are all they have and that’s everything.

***

It ain’t that people don’t have money. There are people who have all kinds of money. There are a lot of leisure houses and pretty cabins and nature resort type things in the hills. They sit fat and complacent on their own patches and the folks in them edge away from the likes of him and Dean when they meet them out in the woods or on the hill trails, not that him and Dean use trails much.

They come upon some pretty lady in a pretty summer dress picking pretty flowers for the fun of it when they’re out foraging. Dean has a bunny hanging from his hunting pouch and Sam has two thirds of a bucket full of berries and a clutch of thistle roots tied in a tangle. The look she gives them is startled wide and breath caught.

Dean can make a smile for her that shines like a polished penny, but Sam is the Left Hand and he doesn’t like her there, in the patch where he knows there’s good foraging. She’s picking flowers. She’s not even wearing good boots. There aren’t many snakes, but there are other things that can bite you. Sam thinks about that and makes his face do something that isn’t a smile, but still harmless.

They pass like pleasant strangers and Sam waits until they’ve gone around a bend before leaning over and tugging on Dean’s sleeve. Dean gives him a look. Sam reaches and runs a finger through the bloodied fur of the bunny before smearing a swath of red on Dean’s forehead. It’s a scythe motion, a hunter’s mark. Dean gives him this look, like he knows what’s on Sam’s mind. Crushed grass, thistle weed and blood. The tart juice of berries in their mouths and the cling of skin stretched over bones that speak of hard winters. They’re not children the way that lady thinks of children, probably.

Sam finds, in times like those, he doesn’t think he minds the bad so much. He’s not going to mind being a Left Hand.

“You run to red anyway,” he tells his brother.   
“Summer dress and pretty flowers,” Dean says and tugs on Sam’s hair, a casual kind of violence, before scritching his nails over Sam’s scalp, a contrasting barbed pleasure that gives Sam goose bumps.   
“Not all of us can spend the long day picking pretty flowers,” Sam answers knowing gnats and mites will eat at them both and red is red no matter how you look at it.

Dean with a rusty slash on his forehead like a king in the blood. There are always things to learn in the woods and he’s hunting with a slingshot this time, because guns are noisy. And they are on someone else’s land as they most always are.

It’s true that Sam loves like a bad bruise, a hurt that goes down to the bone some days. 


	4. Chapter 4

Sam can’t say for sure when the turn comes. It’s a peculiar slow thing. Dean will lick over his finger and write in spit on Sam’s naked back, a cascade of sensations prickling along Sam’s skin. It’s a shivering feeling on the inside, the way spit cools in the shape of words or symbols.

Sam doesn’t giggle like he imagines girls do. Or maybe that’s all wrong. Maybe Dean’s spit on a girl’s skin is different. Maybe she would think it gross and animal. Sam doesn’t. Sam props his chin on his hand and closes his eyes to better see the shape in his mind, tactile in learning what those word are, a code. He likes that more than he can ever really say.

They laugh at each other at other times, but not when they’re like this. Not even when Sam can feel himself running hot.

Dean can birdcall. He can make soft cawing noises and Sam makes noise back. Chirps like a baby bird. Coos a reply. They both know how haunting the death cry of a rabbit is, how lonely the fox sounds, how the bark of deer is like an engine chuff, lungs like bellows.

Sam thinks brother skin is salt and spit and secrets. He’s not wrong about that. Somewhere along the way they’ve turned a little strange when it’s just the two of them.

Sam has some kind of friends at school, same as Dean. Dean has people he knows, mostly an older crowd, rowdy and drinking and getting into meaningless fights. No one sticks much, not even Lynn, who is just waiting until she’s old enough to join the army, or Boots, who wants to live here until he dies and is buried next to his great-great grandfather. There are others, some that come and go, some that Sam sees every day.

When it’s just him and his brother, he’s not sure they’re even all human sometimes. He can tell they make people nervous, even though they really shouldn’t be able to do that, ‘cause they’re just kids. Sam doesn’t know when they started being Other. Maybe it was when he learned to cook up kill-poison. Maybe it was when Dean learned to hit the eye of a bird in fight so neat he can take the head clean off with one shot. Maybe it’s the way they are together, half-talking the language they’ve built up between themselves out of all the things they can and cannot say. Maybe there’s some influence there from the way Cherokee talk of death and names and things that live in the hills, things that run wild in the woods. People can have an influence on them, sometimes, but they can never really touch the core of them.

Sam doesn’t know how he feels about that. He’s not sure if it’s a wrong thing or not.

***

Sometimes it seems everyone is waiting for things to go sideways for them, for Dean to step over the line, for Sam to come to school beaten or starved. So, when it happens, the only surprise is that Sam’s the one who gets in trouble.

Bullies are one thing, and that’s not all bad, Sam can give as good as he gets and he’s shown that. When he can’t, when he gets kicked down, he knows how to deal with that too. He has a brother for that.

Sam can deal with grown ups talking to him like they know he’s lying, or like they think he’s slow. He knows when to keep his mouth shut and when to carefullly construct an argument that won’t leave them looking terribly witty at the end of it. He’s got a brain underneath ‘that hair that could do with a cut’, thanks. Sam’s good at being invisible when he needs to be, silent and still and almost not there.

Sam gets in a fight because an older kid talks shit about Dean and Sam won’t let it stand.

When kids are hurtful ‘cause they’re stupid or angry or just plain mean he can deal with it, he can walk away or hit back. That’s fine, he’s not the kind of kid that expects sunshine every day. He’s smart enough to know that even when someone hits out it’s not always about you. This kid, though, this kid means to hurt him by going after Dean and Sam won’t have that.

It’s a stupid playground fight that doesn’t even happen on school grounds and if it wasn’t for the fact that it went down right in front of the teachers’ parking lot it wouldn’t even have mattered.

Sam gets detention.

The other kid gets nothing, because he’s a fucking Russell.

Dean takes one look at his split lip and sullen expression and makes a rough sound.

“What you get into, Bruce Lee? Huh? What d’you do?” Dean asks reaching out to stroke a thumb over Sam’s jaw.   
“Fucking Russell asshole. Got detention and he went for ice cream, I’m sure.”   
Sam stands still for the touch, which is clean and careful and welcome. It’s hard to be so angry you don’t know if you want to cry or spit nails. Dean’s eyes are worry-green and searching for injuries worse than what he can see.

They have a VCR, scrounged like every thing else. There’s a stack of tapes next to the TV about waist high. Action and horror, mostly. They don’t talk about anything over dinner and Dean pops in _Enter the Dragon_ giving Sam a twist of a smile and a half raised eyebrow. Sam cradles his bowl of spaghetti, pulling his feet up on the couch. The ache in his stomach from the punch he took a warming bruise. He has a slight headache and his lip stings, but other than that, he’s fine.

Dean is more worried than he will ever say. It shows in the way he touches, one hand finding its way to Sam’s calf, grounding pressure there and then a slow coaxing to pull Sam’s feet into his lap. The night goes on like that, shitty static blurring the lines of the movies Dean shoves in the deck and random quotes getting tossed back at the screen like popcorn.

Sam isn’t one for harbouring grudges. He’s pretty good about letting go. He’s had to learn when to hold on and what to hold on to. Anger is a dangerous thing, he knows that well enough. It turns bitter with a wrong twist and he was ready to let it be just that one fight over some bad words and worse timing.

It doesn’t go that way.

Theo Russell carries a chip on his shoulder that Sam guesses doesn’t have much to do with him. It starts up a sadly predictable kind of bullying that Sam could really do without. Mostly it’s the same kind of bullshit that rears it’s ugly head. Sam gets shoved into lockers. Sam gets his clothes dropped in the toilet when he’s in gym class. Sam gets his lunch knocked out of his hand a time or two. It’s petty and it’s vicious and it’s nothing he hasn’t seen or been subjected to before.

The difference is that this is a Russell kid and once he starts it’s like the starting shot for all the other hangers-on, so now Sam’s getting it from all comers and the few friends he does claim get nervous around him. He sees them take a step back and he lets them, because at the end of the day, what the fuck does it matter? He has Dean.

N’other problem, there, though.

Theo knows Dean is Sam’s weak spot. When he can’t get a rise out of Sam with any of the other petty bullshit, he uses what he knows about Dean to try and rile Sam into fighting back. Russells know everyone. Everyone knows Russells. You hit out at one of them and they will pay it back some way three times over. Sam can’t afford to get into fights even on a good day and he’s not having many of those.

It gets to the point where Sam goes through his school days with gritted teeth and his hands balled into fists in his pockets. He can’t fight back because if he does and it gets back to the wrong people, Dean and him are going to be fucked in ways they would never be with CPS or police or wardens. It’s all the same to them where this shit comes from, but Sam can survive and keep his head down.

Or so he thinks.

He hits his limit when he’s on his way out the door and Theo Russell trips him so bad he scrapes his knees and palms on the stone walkway. Sam looks up into the snide, sneering face of the guy and sees a satisfied kind of gleam there that Sam knows to mean this is not the last of it. It will never be the last of it. Sam took him down in a public fight and Theo is never going to forgive him for that. This is going to get worse.

Sam is surprised at the way his mind suddenly goes calm over the rage he can feel burning through his veins. He looks up into that hateful face and wants to do something terrible. Knowing that he can’t in the moment only makes it worse.

So, Sam picks himself up, picks up his backpack and wipes his bloodied palms on his shirt. He smears the red on himself like war paint. This is his blood. He can and will be remembered this way, bloodied and dark eyed. He doesn’t say anything to the high ringing jibes about watching where he goes, about being uncoordinated, about being a “fucking spaz”, about being poor and an outsider and a loser.

He doesn’t fight back.

Kelly told him about the Left Hand, but she never told him what that comes down to in terms of action.

It doesn’t matter, Sam has figured it out.

When the Right Hand takes action it’s more likely to be righteous, straight forward. The Left Hand thinks around corners and goes at things from unexpected angles.

Sam can’t go at the Russells from the front. He can’t report the pushing and shoving to the teachers, they’ll more than likely shrug and say “boys will be boys”, judging from how things went down after the fight in the parking lot.

He can’t talk to the parents, he’d need one of his own for that, and he wouldn’t put Dean through that. Too much of the wrong kind of attention. Russells are more than likely to make things hard for them if they make waves. Sam knows Dean and him can’t afford that. They’re just two little boys who can easily get lost in the woods, after all.

That doesn’t mean Sam can live like this. Dean’s already seen too much and there’s something newly sad in the way Dean’s hands ghost over him, finding bruises and scrapes and torn clothing. The look in Dean’s eyes just about kills Sam, hurts more than any scraped knee ever could.

Historically poison is a woman’s weapon. That’s what Sam’s read, anyway. He has no issues with that.

The path he is going to walk is not necessarily a dark one. It can be, sure, but it doesn’t have to be. That’s an important distinction.

The Devil’s Snare is something Sam wouldn’t normally mess around with, but then again, these aren’t normal times. Scopolamine, atropine and hyoscyamine are not a triad to trifle with. Sam’s always been pretty good at chemistry. It makes sense for him to be good at Kelly’s kind of medicine, the titration and extraction process and the slow build of strength that comes with cooking. The poison Sam draws from the foul smelling herb is going to be live and dangerous. He has a plan for it.

At its worst it will kill. That’s not what Sam’s after, though, not right now.

He knows all about Theo’s little business at school, the pot he sells. It’s a side kicker to the main commerce of meth that some of his kin are cooking. Theo’s there for those who are knocking on the gate, the kids who just want to get out of their own heads for a while. Sam’s going to give them that. Sam is going to give them something much, much more than that.

For all that Theo’s a bully and connected, he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed. He would have let Sam alone if he was.

Sam follows Theo into the woods one day, ghosting a shadow in his furthest step, not a whisper in his wake. Theo’s a heavy tread and not hard to follow. He leads Sam right to his stash. He’s not there five minutes. Sam drifts over when he’s gone, cautiously looking for booby traps and locks and safety, but all there is, is a padlock that Sam can pick with a bobby pin. He’d be dismayed if it wasn’t so convenient.

Sam gives the whole stash a liberal bath in the concoction he’s made. He’s careful with his dosages, he knows too much will kill. It’s not death he’s courting right now, though, just chaos.

Nausea, tachycardia and dissociative hallucinations. Not a pale horse with a pale rider, but enough of a bad ride to trip Theo into disgrace. What’s even better is that Sam knows he smokes his own wares about as much as he sells them. He should be mellower with all that on board, but Theo’s an aggressive bastard and never much better tempered than a badly treated attack dog on the end of a too short chain. Petty vindictiveness is right up his alley.

Sam isn’t those things. Petty or mean or vindictive. Sam is smaller, thinner, faster, smarter and better at thinking around corners. Sam could bring death if he chose to, but like with so many other things, death is not the only way to put an end to the situation he’s in right now. Storms and chaos are good for changing the landscape around you, same as fire and flood.

***

The moon is up and ripe and dawn blood red when Sam wakes up too early in the morning. Dean is pressed against his back, arm slung around Sam’s waist. He’s hard against Sam, heavy with sleep. It’s one of those things that make Sam feel grounded and home and safe, the scent of his brother, the proof of his body, the weight of his care and the unconscious desires of life. Sam doesn’t know if it’s right or wrong, the way he feels. If it’s something born from the way they live or if it’s the way they would have been regardless.

When he feels himself getting hard when they’re like this he doesn’t like to do anything about it. He isn’t always sure he likes it, the rush of his blood seems too fast, all of it much too heady. He’s read about it, seen some porn, same as everyone, but that’s different from when it’s in him, in his own body and mind. Dean is bigger than life and Sam lives in him too, under his skin, with his blood. He lives in moments where Dean is touching him, rough or gentle, calm and protective or with angry jagged coarseness. The feelings that rush and pound with Sam’s pulse are too overwhelming at times and can’t seem to settle on pleasure or pain or fear. Sam loves like a bone bruise, like a half-hidden ache.

He already knows he will kill for Dean without hesitation. He hasn’t really thought about it much, it’s just there, a certainty. Dean’s love can be a thorny vine, barbs long and curved so they only bite when you try to pull away. Sam knows Dean will protect at any cost. He isn’t one hundred percent for-certain-sure if Dean loves like Sam does.

***

Sam hears at school that Trig’s been taken to the hospital. Trig’s not one of the bad ones, just another pot head wastrel with nothing much going for him except how pretty his long hair is, and how smart mouthed his momma is. She’s a fiddle player, tight braid down her back and gingham dress, playing for the tourists and Trig can sing. _In the pines_ with horsehair coming loose from the bow. Trig blows out his mind on Theo’s doctored weed and no one knows why he’s suddenly chasing butterflies and angels through the overgrown baseball diamond. Poor Trig.

He’s just the first.

All the kids that buy from Theo come down with strange symptoms, like some weird druggy flu spreading through the ranks, hitting the habitual smokers hardest and then the more casual ones all the way through the ranks up to Theo himself, who is seen petting anyone and anything that will stand still for it. The Devil’s Snare takes him differently, makes him giggly and tender and moon eyed. It’s such a loss of face, Sam couldn’t have wished for better.

The Snare shows there’s tender in the violent and crazy in the calm, just like there’s angels in the tall grass and tigers under your bed. It’s Left Hand justice, neither good nor bad but rife with chaos.

And Sam has calm for the first time in weeks with all the attention taken off him suddenly. No one is pushing him in the hallways. No one is trying to beat on him or steal his homework. It’s nice. Peaceful.

“You’re not black and blue,” Dean greets him, not a sudden revelation, no matter how it sounds.

Sam walks up to his brother, takes a step into his space, one further than he would usually, and lets his tension go, all of it, in a rush. He’s resting his forehead against Dean’s breastbone. He likes it there. He likes the way he’s not hurting, not angry. He likes that no one has called him anything nasty or tried to trip him at all for the whole week.

He tips his head even further when Dean’s hand comes to rest on the back of his neck, fraternal care in one cupped palm. ‘King in the Blood’, Sam thinks. ‘My Right Hand’.

“There was some trouble,” Sam mumbles. “I took care of it.”   
“Of course you did,” Dean says, certainty and a tug on Sam’s hair, followed by that sweeping scratch that’s always so good.

Sam smiles where Dean can’t see. They stand for a while, companionably leaning on each other.

“I was getting ready to bust some heads,” Dean says eventually.   
“Beating on kids is not good for your reputation,” Sam tells him, making his voice go to that lecturing half-drone that Dean mocks and finds not so secretly amusing.  
“They’d never see me coming,” Dean tells him.

‘Yes, they would’ Sam thinks. That’s the difference between him and his brother. They would see Dean coming because he’d go at them from the front.


	5. Chapter 5

A confluence of things are going to ruin them one day, Sam knows. It’s going to be one too many missed calls and one too many close shaves. It’s not that he believes in fate. Sam has no time for that nonsense, but Sam believes in bad things that gather like crows in the treetops. He also believes in being ready.

There are some skills that most anyone that lives in the hills learns. Kids Sam’s age can handle weapons. They can fix the tires on their bikes. They can make their own dinner. They understand money, how it works, where it comes from, what it’s needed for. Quite a few of them know other, darker things, like what it feels like when drugs hit, or when parents hit, or when to go for a condom and when to run for the thickest, darkest patch of woods you can find.

The thing is, with witches and warlocks being part of innocuous games, magic seems unreasonable. Superstition doesn’t, still. Sam reads about magical thinking and he’s a little enamoured with the idea. He understands something underneath his skin about the thought of it. He feels the knowledge more than thinks it and suddenly the games and the words in dad’s journal make sense in a way he’s not sure he is really ready for. He wants to think that monsters aren’t real, but he knows better. That knowledge is a costly thing. It’s hard not to turn your eyes away from that kind of knowing. But it is knowing that is going to save him, save them both, because sure as anything, Sam knows there are things coming.

Not just bad things, no. Bigger things, different things.

He and his brother are not meant to live out their lives the way they are now. Dean’s not meant to get some pretty girl pregnant at sixteen and shotgun married six months later. Sam’s not meant to turn into Kelly, who, though never bitter, was probably meant for something bigger too, until a logger came along and flashed her a pretty smile.

Sam dreams of warmth and beaches. The ocean.

Sam dreams of other things too, terrible things that leave him shaking when he wakes up with his breath hitching and his skin shivering. Thinking magically, Sam closes his eyes and turns his thoughts to weapons, traps and snares. He turns their house invisible and their bed into a foxhole. He thinks about the way Dean smells next to him, not always good, but always alive and there and _brother_. He loves his brother.

More than anything, he loves his brother.

Sometimes he dreams about that too.

***

Dean finds steady work for a while at a diner. They start him out buzzing tables and move him to prep and then short order cook, or something like that. The diner isn’t big and doesn’t exactly do booming business, but it means Dean brings home food. And money. But mostly it’s the food that makes the difference. There are always some hash browns and some bacon and some day old rolls that would have gone in the trash if they hadn’t come home with Dean instead.

Sam suspects Dean gets some of those things because he’s well liked and hard working and smiles at the customers and flirts with the school girls and jokes around with the early bird crowd. Nickels and dimes for tips, but it makes a difference and Sam feels it in his bones where there seems to be more substance to him suddenly and he grows with it in a stretched ache that makes him less likely to be pointed out as underdeveloped, at least. Dean comes home exhausted and smelling like fry grease.

Sam dreams of venison stew with char grilled potatoes and eats his day-old bread toasted and slathered with honey he’s traded for. They get by.

***

What comes of all this years later when they understand each other too well? Saying things like “let’s make all our mistakes first” and “pretty flowers” and “cold briar”. These things are code, but not code, just words turned inside out and into shapes that make sense between the two of them, but not to the rest of the world without a world of explanations. Sam thinks explanations are so tiresome.

When they talk about things it is more than just words. The way they talk calls up past and hours and things they learned together and things they’ve done apart from each other. It’s a woven thing, made of many reeds.

Sam is a walking young poisoner’s handbook. Dean is a sharpshooter already and will find that a sniper rifle fits in his hands much better than a shovel.

They are of one mind on things like bullies and hostility and unnecessary cruelty. They don’t agree about a lot of things: liquorice, Hank Williams, one-night stands.

Violence will come, Sam thinks. It won’t be the swift clean violence of taking a rabbit in mid-leap, either. It will be the kind of violence that can be countered by the right hand’s forthrightness and the left hand’s sly deftness. It will be violence without reason, or with perverted reason. It will be things that make the king in the blood need his left hand. That need will be a terrible thing unless it’s tempered by love. Or, perhaps it will be worse for that.

  
  
***

Russells are a kind of poison. They’re seeped into the whole hillside, like a lead vein. They’re in the groundwater. They pollute.

Drugs are a peculiar thing. Addiction burns through families, leaving nothing un-singed. Soot on their hands, ash in their mouths. You can see it, the slow darkening of purpose, the attrition of will, the wearing away of pride. Truth dies in the first wave, everything else burns later, slow or fast.

Sam knows about poison. Drugs are poisons. Sam thinks he might as well learn about fire too and sets about studying it. Poison is like chemistry, chemistry lives right next door to fire, kin to combustible things. Sam reads about how poison is a woman’s weapon and then reads about how fire almost never is a weapon at all. Arson as a method of murder is rare. Poison as a method of murder is sometimes sanctioned by the state. It all seems straightforward until you take one step back and then tilt your head.

Then it all becomes the territory of the left hand.

He finds he kind of likes the way that makes things look. In school they teach a kind of ethics that are more often than not completely contradictory to his experiences. He reads in history books about how the country was united and then he reads about how it was built on the slaughter of the indigenous people and slave labour. Blood and broken backs and war, always war.

And so justice becomes something less than and more than. It is less than fair a lot of the time and more than the rule of violence, of brute force. Except… if you live in the hills then the Russells are more law than the law because they have shotguns and can bury bodies where they won’t be found, if anyone even cares to go looking.

Sam is putting together a list in his head. Things he can do. Things he is willing to do. Things he will sacrifice. Things he will never give up, even if it kills him. That last one is short, it only has a name on it.

Because… because Sam can feel it coming, the change. He can feel it in the whisper of the pines, the slow sough and creak of them.

To be ready when the time comes he will need to know, to have knowing, but more than that, he must have a clear definition in his own mind of what can be done and what he is willing to do.

***

Dean is good at working. He’s always been good at that. He stitches together an existence for them out of the blood of his own cuts and scrapes, the sweat of his brow. He still laughs an open joyous and sometimes slightly cruel laugh at Sam, with Sam, for Sam. When the power cuts out they have fire and candles. When the food runs out they have game and foraging. Chicken feet soup. When their clothes get torn they get mended and traded. Everything is doable. Nothing is impossible.

Mostly, that’s because there really is no choice.

They are not Sam and Dean Winchester here, thanks to their father. They are East and Digger Winter. Poor boys, but not for true hillbillies. So, just one more thing they’ve lost, one more thing they keep close and keep to themselves. There will never be an official record for Samuel Winchester and Dean Winchester living scraped meagre lives in high thin air. It’s all smoke and mirrors and bunny blood. Sam thinks that’s more amusing than it should be, really.

Winter, because dad’s idea of aliases was never really all that clever. Keep the W and make sure they always and forever get stuck at the back of the line when anything goes alphabetically, like life most always does in school and in cues and on paperwork and in the payroll. Why not, after all? Why not make sure the underdog stays under? It’s just like their daddy to be so backwards stubborn.

It gets cold in the winter. It gets frost bitter. But there are other things about winter that Sam likes, like how close Dean will sit with him on the couch. How close he’ll sleep. Those are good, warm things.

It’s years and years and years away before they ever hear anyone say “winter is coming” and have it mean something other than what it does between the two of them. Sam has a particular appreciation for the curl of Dean’s mouth when he hears that thing said. Worlds between them, words between them and understanding and knowing.

***

On the side of the wall closest to where Sam sleeps he’s tacked up pictures of beaches that he’s cut out of magazines. Blue, blue water and sky, pale stretches of sand and sometimes hints of green. Palm trees. He’s been to beaches, he thinks. He has vague memories of the gritty texture of sand underneath his feet, the bite of salt on the warm wind blowing ocean air at them. He’s not sure when that might have been, what they might have been doing.

Swimming in the ocean with his big brother and the sharks and the sea monkeys and the slick of seaweed tickling his legs.

Sam wants things. It’s human nature, he thinks. He wants things to do with oceans. Maybe he just wants things to do with all that clean looking water. It’s hard to tell what those things mean when he’s laying there on his side looking at his pictures, his brother warm at his back. He thinks he might want things, water ocean skies, all that, but he wants them with his brother. Always with his brother.

***

Sam doesn’t really have friends, which is kind of weird when you think about it for long enough. Sam has people he hangs out with, people he does homework with, people he knows. He has a lot of knowledge of people.

After that thing with the snare, Sam makes a decision.

He has Dean. He has his brother. He has the sure knowledge that things are going to get messy one way or the other.

He makes a new friend. No, well, that isn’t the whole entire truth. Sam is friends with Kelly, who is a grandmother. Sam is friendly with most people. Sam makes a friend of the sheriff’s daughter, Jackie. They ain’t Russells, which is something to be thankful for.

Dean asks him about it one day.

“Why you hanging around the sheriff’s kid, huh, Sammy? What are you up to?”

Dean knows him too damned well.

It’s not easy being a Winter boy. It’s not easy being the sheriff’s kid either. Sam isn’t interested in her like that, like the way Dean makes it sound, all loose and easy. Sam has a strategic interest in Jackie and it makes him feel a little mercenary. Jackie is hardened to the kind of attention she gets. She is used to being uninvited to things, fear of the narc, fear of word reaching the law about drugs, drink, underage sex, all the usual suspects. She’s smart about it, never a lawbreaker herself, but inevitably kind of a ball buster. She takes an interest, but she doesn’t make too much of what she’s seen or heard unless her daddy asks her outright.

Dean knows all about where Sam spends his time and with who, so he knows Sam’s taken to doing his homework with Jackie. Talking with her. Being friendly.

“She grown right precious, man,” Sam tells his brother. “And there’d be little point in kicking my ass about that in the hallway.”   
“They still doing that?” Dean asks, voice sharp.   
“No more than before. I got a purpose with her, though, I ain’t gonna tell you different.”   
“She pretty?” Dean asks.   
“Not pretty enough for statutory, Dean, come on. Sheriff's daughter.”   
“As long as you know what you’re doing.”   
“Don’t I always?” Sam shoots back with a crooked smile.

Dean just reaches out and punches him in the arm. There’s no real force behind it.

“Take care where you put your feet,” Dean tells him.   
“I will if you take care where you stick your dick,” Sam counters.

This time the punch is harder, but still not with real intent to harm.

“Don’t you worry about that, boy,” Dean tells him like it’s not an issue.

It is, though. Not for unreasonable reasons. There is no sex ed. in the hills. It’s more of a “leave room for the lord” school of thought, which is why Sam has looked up the statistics on premarital sex, teenage pregnancy and the spread of venereal diseases. It’s grim reading. Sam is not shy about his opinions on all that. He is not shy about making sure there are condoms in the bathroom cabinet. Sam is not going to be an uncle before he’s fifteen. One good thing about growing up with Dean? It’s really hard to make Sam blush about these things.

When he thinks about it for himself, putting one of those things on and being inside someone, he’s not sure what it makes him feel. Restless, maybe. A little uncomfortable, and unhappy about it. That car crash of feelings only gets worse when he thinks about Dean doing any of that.

Jackie’s dad has prescription drugs in their bathroom cabinet. They come in those orangey little bottles and have long complicated names and longer, more complicated warnings that Sam suspects he’s given up on reading or heeding. Jackie’s dad is that kind of wiry skinny and worn looking that means something hurts. He has a big droopy moustache that could be distinguished if he was more tidy about shaving. There’s something sallow about him, something not quite steady in his posture, something vague in his expression. He’s sharp when he needs to be, has cop-eyes, same as any and every cop Sam’s ever met, that roving all-seeing gaze. He moves with a kind of grim deliberate purpose most every time Sam’s met him.

Jackie’s dad is an addict.

It’s a legal addiction, a doctor sanctioned one. It’s still opioids. That almost always starts with pain, Sam knows. Maybe he was shot on the job. Maybe he twisted his ankle going down a hill. Maybe he couldn’t handle his wife leaving. Maybe something. Maybe a lot of things. Sam isn’t going to ask.

Maybe Jackie has tried his pills at some point. Sam wouldn’t put it past her. Not because she wants to get high, so much, but because she’s curious. Sam’s that same kind of curious, touched parts of plants and roots and seeds to his tongue and felt it tingle. Wanted to swallow smoke and breathe fire. It’s made him see things. It’s made him heave his guts out in the woods. It’s made him spend an afternoon watching butterflies land in his hands flickering like a camp fire. It’s made him understand that sometimes there’s a devil in the hills that takes you for a ride no matter what you think you want. You got to be careful so the devil don’t get a hold of you, hand on ankle, to drag you down.

So, Sam knows a little too much already about the sheriff and the sheriff’s daughter, who wants to be a doctor, of all things. That’s a pretty heavy dream to carry in high air.


	6. Chapter 6

Sam’s brother is a beautiful boy. He’s heard it said enough times. He thinks those words are not exactly true. The description is wrong, lacking. Dean’s hands are rough, covered in little scars and nicks and blood and dirt and sap has worked its way into the whorls of his fingerprints, the bends of his knuckles. Dean’s hands are not clean.

Neither are Sam’s.

Dean’s not a beautiful boy because of the configuration of his bones and skin. Dean’s eyes are green and his hair is light and his shoulders are broader than most kids his age. There are other things about him, too. The length of his stride and the way he holds himself, the fact that he speaks with a kind of confidence that most grown men strive for. There’s easy charm in his way with people when he tries for it. There are a lot of things about Dean that add up into something more than a shape and type and a standard.

That’s not beauty. Not to Sam.

It’s a thing he likes to pick at when he gets angry with Dean, with their dad for leaving, with people trying to mess things up for them, with life in general. And he does. Get angry. So, so angry it sometimes scares him.

He watches the way people react to Dean and he sees what they see. They see the surface, a skimming kind of appeal. They don’t see the things that make him integral to Sam’s very survival, to his life. They never will, because those things are not seen. They are the gloaming things, not of light or dark, but there in the slanting shade. That’s where Sam finds Dean’s beauty, in the base survival and long shadows of their life.

***

They wrestle out in the dirt back behind the house. The grass there might have been a lawn at some point but now it’s part scrub, part moss and part bare pine needle rich soil. Dean holds him down, scrubs a hand vigorously over Sam’s head, dragging dirt into his scalp and leaving an ache. Sam retaliates the only way he can, smaller and lighter as he is. He bites at Dean’s arms, claws with ragged nails, kicks and bucks and fights, fights, fights, a squirming mass of blank refusal. He doesn’t know how to back down.

Oddly it never ends in tears, the way Sam’s seen it be for some kids. They’re not really trying to hurt each other, just play fighting. They go at each other hard, but the pain from Dean’s grappling hold, or the cut of Sam’s teeth always veers just left of real hurt into something blunt and fraternal. They leave bruises on each other. Scrapes. They take off skin and rip through clothes. It’s still friendly. Dean sometimes tickles Sam like he did when they were much younger. It doesn’t always work now, Sam’s trained himself out of the giggle fits he used to have, new skin tougher and less sensitive. It still feels good to be touched.

After, when they lay panting on their backs with arms and legs splayed out, picking at scabs and inspecting the damage, there’s a kind of sweet lull where no hurt feelings go. Sam wonders, sometimes, how they would look to someone watching from the outside. The cold, silent fury of their battles, the ringing insults and chuffed laughs, the exertion so obvious on their faces. This endless battle of scrub and dirt and brother, an ancient and immediate thing. A never ending fraternal spat enriched by their affection for each other. It probably all looks meaner than it is.

Sam knows coming up with bruises and scrapes isn’t always something that other people readily understand when he says “just messing around with my brother”, because they all know Dean is bigger and stronger, but Dean would never intentionally hurt him, put hurt on him like that, and it’s just what they are. It’s how they fit.

Sam also knows that Dean’s arm around his shoulders and the easy way they hug and handle each other is just as confusing. “He’s my brother” doesn’t seem to explain that either. Sam doesn’t care. Dean is his by right and by blood and by a thousand other ways, and he doesn’t give two shits if others don’t get that brothers are like them sometimes. All those stoic faces that never reach out to touch their kin can be that way if they like. Him and Dean don’t have that kind of distance. They never did.

***

Dean doesn’t keep secrets from Sam anymore. Not big ones. When trouble starts for Dean, Sam knows. There are some that will try to use you, no matter how hard you hold out and Dean's fought hard against the subtle hints that he should maybe run a few errands for the generation of Russell clan that is one step above and away from him and Dean.

It means nothing good.

Dean has been able to deflect. He can't act stupid and he can't really say no, but he can be slick and through their fingers like rain when he has to be. It won't last, though, and they both know it.

When four wheelers turn hard around their yard one day, three of them, Dean tells Sam to go and hide. Sam has never hid in his life, but the look Dean gives him makes him go. He's in the rafters before the sounds of the engines die down.

The conversation that follows is not a conversation at all. Threats of violence and promises of something bad to come. The Russell Dean is talking to is wearing all brand new camouflage gear in sky blue. Jacket, pants, bandana. Sky blue. His ride is cherry red. Flat nose, broad face. Jowly. Ugly sneer. Ugly face. Ugly words.

Sam stays in the rafters.

If Dean won't do what they say... it will be bad.   
If Dean does what they want... it will still be bad.

Once they get their hooks in you they never let you go. They will have Dean, and because they have Dean, they will have Sam too. It's not that they're valuable, not really. It's that Dean has that light to him that makes him seem like he can do anything, will things into a shape that's pleasing, that gets the right result. Sam is invisible, mostly, but he is young and that will carry a value too, because a kid like him will not be sent to prison. They are to be beasts of burdon, mules for the Russell clan.

Sam thinks he already has the beginning of a seedling hate for these men, this way of looking at life. They talk about honor, they talk about not betraying, but Sam already knows that his life and Dean's life isn't really worth anything to these men, other than what they can force out of it. They will go to the grist mill of the penal system, not one penny spent on either of them for freedom or justice.

Sam has fertile soil to grow his seed of hatred, to nurse it into a blooming strangling vine.

He and Dean don't talk about it, once he's down out of the rafters and the last trailing grumble of engines has died away. Go to hell, he thinks. Go to hell with you all, let the devil take you down.

He might be a child, too young for the burdons he has, too skinny for the shirt he wears, but he will be thrice damned if he ever lets anyone use his brother.

***

Dean holds out for longer than he should be able to. He gets a terrible beat down as his reward for all that perseverence. Sam cleans up blood and watches bruises form and thinks frightful things through a haze of terror and purblind rage.

They can't fight and win.

They can fight. They can. They can try to go to the law, to an authority. Sam knows, though, that the sheriff is in someone's pocket, or under someone's thumb. He's seen the signs of benevolent neglect of duty and the inauspicious turning of eyes that all those in power practise here.

They could maybe try to broker some kind of deal, but they have no power, no money, no land, no standing, no allies and nothing much to trade with that is of any consequence to anyone but themselves.

So that's the fight they could try. And they would lose.

Him and his brother could easily die like this, beaten and thrown in a ditch somewhere. More bones scattered without anything to mark their passing. So many woods to be lost in.

Sam has learned early that life is a fragile thing, like hoarfrost forming on a spiderweb. Easily broken and forgotten as soon as sunlight hits. Watching Dean in pain hurts.

Sam doesn't know much, but he knows he will not let the Russells have his brother.

Years later Dean will look into Sam's eyes and say “the things I'm willing to do for you... it scares me sometimes”. Sam will think _the things I've been doing for you since I was twelve should scare you more_.

They can't come at this head on. They can't come at this righteous. Lynn is gone, enlisted, and Thumper is working a logging run and they have no allies, no resources, but what they have, what Sam has, is craftiness and a base kind of vicious survival instinct that reaches out and cloaks them both, wraps them up and makes them all too dangerous for how young they are.

“When this happpens, after it's done,” Sam tells his brother, “we're gonna have to run.”

Dean looks at him for a long moment and then gives him that little quirk of a smile that makes Sam's stomach swoop like falling.

“You go where I go and I go where you go,” Dean says.

They eat spagetti and watch _The Creature of The Black Lagoon_.

A lot of things crash together in Sam's head. When you have nothing, when there's not more to you than what you can fit in a duffel, you learn things about yourself that many people never seem to learn at all. Sam is never going to be a righteous man, he's kind of figured that out by now. He's never going to be elegant in the way he handles that lack. When there's not much more to you than hand-me-down jeans and slender bones poking through winter lean skin your mind becomes more than just a vehicle for the things you think you want. It becomes a blade. It becomes a trap. It becomes capable of thinking in six different directions at once. When you grow up half-wild in the hills you learn how to bait and trap and hunt and skin. You learn how to be patient and small and still and clever. You learn the fisherman's endurance. You learn the hunter's predator gaze. You learn the gatherer's opportunism.

If you're smart enough you learn how to be dangerous in a quiet kind of way.

The Russells are in the land like lead and in the community like a cancer. They are insidious killers, slow acting most of the time, but once you know how to look for them, they're not as subtle as they seem to think they are.   
  
Sam can do subtle. And Dean's the better hunter out of the two of them, Sam's king-in-the-blood, his bruised defence.

***

The steps they need to take are difficult, but not at all impossible. Maybe it is in part the arrogance of youth, a way of looking at things that mean nothing seems to big, nothing seems final, no matter how uncomfortable and unpredictable things are going to have to get.

Sam finishes out the last week of school with his back to a wall and eyes in the back of his head. Dean gets fired from his job when he turnes up beaten all to hell. Sorry, sad faces, but no excauses. It makes Sam feel that impotent rage again, that hopeless fury glowing in his mind. It tastes of ash and burning bodies. He wants to go up to any of the Russells and stick a long slender knife between their ribs between math and gym class. Instead he goes to the office where he sometimes helps out when he has free time, something he started doing when he was still a target for random punches and kicks in the halls.

Forward thinking, being smart and safe isn't all about keeping your head down. Sam got the idea from Jackie, who has made a habit of hanging around the sheriff's station. It's a good place to be, at the center of a web, close to the spiders. Sam helps with routine filing, putting things into the computer, doing little jobs that give him access to information he wouldn't be able to get any other way.

Sam finds out about the surveyor's maps that all the mining companies have aways had a hunger for. Those are harder to get at, but there's a local history section at the library. He goes after school and makes copies of things that he shouldn't be able to get because Sam is good at using his doe eyes to hide intent behind something that looks like innocent scholarly pursuit. Sam is being a clever boy and thinking forward around corners.

He and Dean come home about a week later to find the cabin vandalized. Every window broken. Things crushed under boot. Furniture overturned. Someone has pissed on their couch.

It's just a matter of time then.

It will be fire next. More violence. Guns, maybe. Something in the dark. Pitchforks. Torches.

Their dad never really talked about the war. Sam has done his own reading, and so has Dean. They've watched movies, they've watched documentaries. They've heard the tales.

One thing both Sam and Dean understand, probably better than they should, is that there is nothing much you can do about an overwhelming force if you try to face it standing out in the open.

If they try to dig in they will get overrun. The thing is, they could go. Just leave and never look back. It would be scary, in a way, but before dad brought them here they never stayed anywhere for long. They have been nomads before, that's not the issue.

If the Russells hadn't made them angry they would have gone. If they hadn't wrecked the things Dean spent so many hours putting together, if they hadn't broken skin and raised bruises, if the Russells hadn't brought all this grubby violence to their door, they would have just been gone.

Now, though, now Sam and Dean are both angry and scared and they know the Russells will keep pushing and pushing and it will end in the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines and that's the thing, that's the dangerous thing.

No, they will never be able to win this from the front, head on, righteous. It's going to have to be a different kind of battle.

That's what guerilla warfare is for.


	7. Chapter 7

There's a hunting blind they found on one of their foraging rambles. It's been abandoned for some time, probably set up by a gamekeeper and then forgotten. Camouflage is still good and only improved with age. They pack up what they need, Dean hides their car and then they take to the wild.

It's not the first time they've gone into the woods this way. Hunting, foraging, target practise. Sam thinks about what he's heard about camping and almost laughs. Two day stays on camping grounds with hot showers and marshmallows and space heaters. This is not that. This is cold stream water and living quiet. Sound carries in strange ways in the woods. You might not know what you're hearing, but you know when something doesn't fit.

“What's rolling around in that head of yours?” Dean asks quietly late the second evening when Sam is sitting with a map spread out before him. The blind is big enough for the both of them and all their gear, low slung tattered camouflage canvas braided through with branches. The light filters through in oddly pretty ways. Dean is mottled in shadow, patterned like a cheetah. Predator. King. Right hand.   
“I'm not the bag you keep your brain in,” Sam tells him and gives a sharp grin.   
“True. But, also, I know you have something rattling and rolling.”   
“Don't I always?” Sam asks him and then reaches into his pocket and takes out the compass, putting it on top of the map with the kind of slow significant movement that tells Dean where all the tricks are.   
“Oh,” Dean hums, a low grumbling kind of sound. Pleasant. Heavy. Portentious.

They are clever serious boys. They are lost, hard-edged starving angry young men. They are slender ghost-footed sure agile woodsmen. Trackers. Hunters.

See, now, boys their age play at war in a park and tent out in a backyard and get a hot meal and a bath before bedtime. Boys their age don't hunt and shoot and strategize and read books on statecraft and learn how to solder radios and work fulltime jobs.

If the Russells had just left them alone, none of what comes next would ever have had to happen.

It's not a killing game. They can't afford that. A killing game has too many losers and raises the stakes far too high. They have to be swift and silent ghosting through the woods. It takes some getting used to.

For a while it's much harder than Sam thought it might be, but then he starts to realize they are still caught in the set ways of things. Little brother, big brother. Dean is his everything and has been for a long time, his only kin, his only protector, his to lean on. It isn't until now that the first and most important shift happens. They become friends out in the hills, in the pines. They've always been friends in some blood's thicker ways, but now there's a scraped raw to the bone thing that neither of them has looked blatantly in the face before and there it is. Trials and tribulations, yes, but also light and laughter and something so kind and essential at the core of it Sam falls in love with the feeling.

More than that, though, these days of hunger and wet dawns and longer days of insect bites and dirt under the fingernails. Sam thinks nothing has ever been like this before, nothing has ever felt like this, edged with fear and hope and a desire for vengence as Dean's bruises slowly go from plum to sallow.

They start slow because of that. They start with what they know, green growth in patches deep in the woods. They're very careful around those incongrously green fields because there are gardners there, and guards. The harvest is a while off yet, all the green much too tender, so that's all the summer's work they're marking on their maps in longitude and latitude. Then the trailers and small cabins that house much more sinister things. Should be more security there, but strangely there's less. Sam thinks it's unforgivably sloppy. Dean thinks it makes sense because the net value of the product is that much higher, and so is the risk.

Sam thinks of chemistry and combustion and treachery and he has to give Dean that point.

They make a gentleman's agreement, him and his brother. No fighting. No bickering. Actively trying to not agitate because their whole entire survival and the success of this plan hinges on them being of one mind, close as they can get to in one skin. Sam finds that no matter how it should shafe to wake with his nose in his brother's unwashed armpit, he likes it. Marks his brother with goatweed, chase-devil, a red swath on his forehead like with the bunny blood, but better because it sticks longer. So too the wild lavender he crushes down their boots.

Fish comes to the hook easy as far out as they are, so they mostly eat well, at least once a day. Sometimes they both dream of greasy diner food. There's a leanness of the meat to both of them after a month, both of them still growing, but there are no divots in their fingernails to tell of malnutrition.

Tall pine, tall oak, hundred year old ceder. Sam remembers a time when he saw his dad maybe two or three times a week. Dean, though, was always there. Now is a time when they breathe the same air, sleep on the same pallet, drink from the same cup. It's easy to imagine their hearts beating out the same rhythm.

When they are stalking there are moments of wrenching fear, the double-time bass beat of adrenaline rushing your pulse. Leaves Sam with the shakes. Probably his brother too, if the glitter of his widening eyes is anything to go by. The woods can play tricks on you. You hear a cracking of branches and for a moment it's easy to believe that is the sound of men moving closer. You feel eyes on you and you don't know if it's man or beast watching. You hear dogs and can't tell how near or far. At night there's so much noise. Crick rills and the sough of wind. There's murmur and rustling and the keening of red tailed hawks, the death-toll hooting of owls. It's a wide world to walk through and come night they have to be three times as careful themselves, no lights, no sounds. Stalking hunter gait through the underbrush, not a footprint left behind.

Dean has his rifle. Sam has his knife. This is not a killing game, but it is still a very dangrous thing they are doing. They are just young enough for it to feel like a game. They are young enough to be immortal. Not unaware of the danger, never that, but somehow immune to the worst consequence. Or maybe that's their twice damned, thrice blessed existence.

It takes all summer, close calls and long nights and harsh living. A foundation for all the things they are to become much later.

Sam remembers all this as eternal time in years to come. The woods have that neither here nor there quality to them, could be anywhere, any-when. It's an existence removed from all the things that college kids talk about. Later he doesn't even know how to describe any of it to the girl he lives with for a while. He might be able to love her, but he can never put words to what there is between him and his brother.

He can never put words to his own particular brand of justice either. It reeks of the cruelty of scorched earth. Fair Lady Justice is blind, a scale in her left hand and a sword in her right. She's not Nemesis with her lash, bridle and mesuring rod, and Sam thinks maybe he should just acknowledge that his pantheon is probably better represented by the bloodier gods. He is closer to Nemesis.

They sit down in the sun when they are as done as they can think to be and Sam has a pad on his lap, pen held lightly between his fingers, writing everything out slowly and neatly, page after page of it. Names. Coordiantes. Descriptions. He wishes idly that he could have had access to the sheriff's computer for an afternoon. He could have gotten real arrest records and some kind of roster over the all the players, a rogues gallery, but he's been gone for weeks now and Jackie wouldn't have let him in anyway. He's just pleased he managed to steal some official envelopes from the sheriff's station. It will have to be enough.

“We're just going to stuff all that in an evelope and mail it out?” Dean asks when they've emptied themselves of every scrap on information.   
“Seems weird, right?” Sam asks.   
“So little for so much,” Dean tells him, brushing his fingers over the edge of the marked up map.   
“We can't win or lose this one,” Sam says. “Just play the game.”   
“And even if we win we still lose”, Dean adds grimly.   
“No. No, even if we lose - we win.”   
“If it all comes to nothing?”

Sam thinks about that for a long moment.

“This goes to the DEA. St. Louis division. I got a name, even, someone to send it all to.”   
“Sheriff's daughter get you that?”   
“She went through her dad's secretary's rolodex.”   
“You know he's going to be their first stop, right?”  
“Well. Yeah. He could have done something.”  
“What could he have done? Nothing to stop him from taking a bullet in the back.”

Sam looks at Dean, his sun burnt skin and closed off expression.

“You change your mind? Want to stay?” Sam asks.  
“Oh, hell, no. All that was here is over. Been over for a while.”  
“Then this is the last of it. And maybe, if we have the devil's luck, one day this will be a good thing that we've done.”   
“They're going to tear this place apart.”  
“I hope they do,” Sam tells his brother earnestly, thinking of bruises, of threats, of bullies, of eyes turned the other way.   
“Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

Sam grins at him, sharp as anything.

“This ain't my bad side.” Sam tells him.   
“Oddly, I believe you.”  
“And, 'sides, it's not just me. It's us. Our judgement, our justice.”

Dean wraps an arm around his shoulders then, dragging him in. There's a press of lips to Sam's head and a long slow exhale from Dean that Sam can feel through his whole body.

“This,” Sam says, voice a little muffled. “I'm... I am your Left Hand, Digger.”   
“Okay?”   
“You have to understand. It's important. Left hand justice is ...”

Dean pulls back just enough that he can see Sam's eyes.

“What now?” Dean asks him and this is maybe the thing the whole summer has been about.   
“Something Kelly told me. My way of doing things is always going to be...”   
“A little fucking terrifying?”   
“I was going to say different.”   
“Yeah. And a little fucking terrifying.”  
“It's not just me. It's still both of us. You know that. I could never do this without you.”   
“I know that.”

Dean gets quiet after that, still holding Sam captured with his hands and his eyes and the weight of his care and consideration. Kissing-close.

“Even when I have nothing, I have you,” Dean says and it's so exactly what Sam is thinking that it's eerie.

***

Wendigos have cycles. Sam and Dean learn about that much, much later. They kill every seven years, every fourteen years, every twenty-three years. Some day, maybe, they'll head back into the hills to get the thing that might have been the thing that got their dad. Sam's still not convinced that's what happened.

Lost on a hunt does not mean that the monster got you. For all they know their father might have fallen down a hill and broke his neck. Or maybe he just left. Sam can't get over the niggling suspicion that their dad wandered off and found himself something better to do with his time than take care of them. Bogged down and hindered and leaving things behind. Sam kind of hates it when he thinks like that, but his mind runs off track sometimes. Runs on hill-time, eternal time. Runs on Left Hand thinking, which is unforgiving in the way it looks at all the angles, searching out every single motivation.

His brother is good at shaking him out of the worst of it.

They go from hills to flatlands, from solitude and green woods to the clutter and rusted metal of Singer's Salvage Yard. Sam lets his brother do all the talking. He plays it shy, plays it cautious. Bobby Singer was their dad's sometimes friend, sometimes hunting buddy. He seems heartbroken that they've been out on their own for so long and Sam can't really understand that at all. If he cared so much then why the hell hadn't they known about it? Why hadn't Dean had his phone number? Why hadn't dad made sure they knew they could call for help?

Dean wanted the car, the Cheavy, that's why they came. They get stuck there because of all the concern. It won't be forever, but it will be for some time.

The thing Sam thinks about the most for the next couple of months is – what do you do with an enemy once you've defeated them? He spent so much time hating the Russells, thinking about the Russells, trying to survive the Russells, trying to beat down the Russells. Now he has all this room in his mind for other things.

Dean's adrift too, but differently. He's so used to being a certain way, to taking care of things, to working, cooking, mending. He's so good at all those things that the way Singer tries to stick them into a life of school and play and a worn kind of carefree living with nothing of the duty Dean lives with tattooed onto his skin is a bad idea. It makes his brother restless, Sam can see it. More than that, he can feel it under his own skin, the roiling agitation of some half-wild and vicious being dressed up in shoes that don't fit. Bear broken from a slumber, fish thrashing on a hook.

Flat lands are different. Then again, in some ways lands are all the same. Even the terrain of hunting is not all that varied. The stalking game is all the same. Poor boys all over are all the same. Kindness is still kindness. They try to come back from being Digger and East to being the Winchester boys, but there's too much run off ice melt in their own water now.

It's not just being left behind that has made them what they are. It's the unacknowleged knowledge that there is a King in the blood and his Left Hand sitting on the splintery backporch looking out over scraggy brush and old car carcasses.

To be children is too much of a task somehow. Sam isn't stupid, he knows they are inexperienced in many things, ignorant of many things. He knows they aren't strong enough, big enough, to take on a full life of hunting and being grown-ups the way the rest of the world would see it.

What they are, what they have made themselves into, is going to take time to percolate, to stop feeling rough and unfinished.

These are the things they have: a car that is not their own. A life that they barely have a hold on. An understanding of kinship and loyalty and blood. Each other. They have each other.

When the dark times come, as they always do, as they always will, Sam knows he has a King, a reason to be the Left Hand, a reason for justice, there in the way his brother's scent still carries notes of wild grasses and ceder. He will not squander his brother's devotion, or his own bone bruise love. They will lay their enemies low. They will hide nobility under the tattered flannels and busted bluejean poverty of how they came up in the world. Everything they carry is carried under the skin.

Sam leans into Dean's shoulder and lets the harsh sunlight wash over him, still seeing mountains when he closes his eyes and breathes out the last of the high thin air to breathe in scrub and dust and rust and the blood familiar kin-scent of his brother.

 

THE END


End file.
